Jacob Abrams
Biography
Jacob Abrams was a Russian-Jewish anarchist bookbinder and lead defendant in the landmark First Amendment case Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). On August 22-23, 1918 he and four others were arrested in New York for throwing Yiddish and English leaflets from a Lower East Side rooftop denouncing Wilson's deployment of U.S. troops to Soviet Russia. Convicted Oct 23, 1918 under the Sedition Act; sentenced to 20 years and $1,000 fine. SCOTUS upheld 7-2 (famous Holmes/Brandeis "marketplace of ideas" dissent). Served roughly 3 years at Atlanta; deported to Soviet Russia aboard SS Estonia Nov 24, 1921; later left USSR for Mexico, where he died 1953. He was born January 24, 1886 — the 1883 given in some references is the weaker reading — and died in Mexico on June 10, 1953; a temporary medical readmission to the United States shortly before his death did not end the exile his conditional pardon imposed.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): A prominent Jewish anarchist in New York, he belonged to the group that published the underground Yiddish newspapers Shturem (1917) and Frayhayt (1918). Married fellow anarchist Mary Domsky, a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Arrested in 1918 for printing and distributing leaflets opposing US intervention in the Russian Civil War, he was the central defendant in the landmark Supreme Court case Abrams v. United States. Following their conviction, he and the other defendants were released to be deported to Soviet Russia on November 23, 1921.
In Russia founded at a steam laundry for Comintern employees and worked with the anarcho-syndicalist Golos Truda press and bookstore, but soon became disillusioned and left with Mary for Paris in 1925, then Mexico City in 1926. There he was active among exiled Spanish anarchists of the Tierra y Libertad group and associated with Leon Trotsky. Co-founded the Yiddish antifascist newspaper Di Shtime in Mexico City 1939. After a cancer diagnosis in 1945 he was temporarily readmitted to the US under FBI supervision for medical treatment, and he died 1953 in Mexico.
Laisvė’s contemporary report identifies federal judge Henry D. Clayton as the sentencing judge in the Abrams-group prosecution and individually lists this defendant among those sentenced. Its long imposed prison terms are not measures of actual custody. Reported intended institutional destinations and relative sentencing dates are not substituted for independently established actual transfers or exact dates.
Richard Polenberg’s 1994 study identifies Francis Gordon Caffey as the prosecutor in the Abrams defendants’ sedition trial. Journal of Supreme Court History, 1994, printed page 26.
